The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (33 page)

Toward what?

“Joanna!”

Cumulative stress, terror, and weariness broke inside her; she flung herself to her feet with a sob and threw herself to the door. In blind darkness, she groped at the barred Judas . . . “Antryg, get me out of here!”

“Get back from the window. I can't touch the door-it's spelled-put your hand up-gently . . . .”

Through the rusted iron of the peephole's crosspiece, she felt the prick of a sword against her fingers. Sliding her hand carefully up the blade, she felt a metal ring with a key on it. Fumblingly, she groped at the side of the door she thought she remembered the keyhole was on. It wasn't. Another scream rent the palpitating air, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

“What is it?” she gasped.

“It's a Screamer, a terror-spell-it's not going to last and neither is the darkness, so hurry!”

A splinter ran into her questing fingers-she disregarded it, guided the key into the lock, and wrenched the heavy mechanism over. Some how that deep, extraordinary voice defused the dread of the dark, reduced the cries of grief and anguish to what they were-noises-and made her expel her breath in a shaky laugh. “I thought you couldn't use magic . . .”

“I can't-this is courtesy of Magister Magus, and he's probably taken to his heels by this time.”

She slipped through the half-opened door and felt the familiar strength of a bony arm in the worn velvet sleeve around her waist, dragging her along the corridor in the blackness. Already, shapes were coming faintly clear to her eyes-men running here and there, the torches burning like shreds of fluttering cloth. Another scream rent the air, horrifying with all the despairing pain of torture and grief.

“We can't . . .” she began, trying to stop, remembering old Minhyrdin the Fair.

“Yes we can. Now run!” Inexorably, he dragged her on. She could see him dimly now, the beaky face colorless in its tangled frame of graying brown hair, the spectacles beginning to catch the renewing light of the torches. He held a sword in his free hand, undoubtedly taken from one of the blinded guards. His longer strides made her stumble; he hauled her up a twisting spiral of stone stair and through a guardroom that seemed filled with men blundering about, weapons in their hands, not certain which way to go-shadows against a deeper darkness, their voices a clamor of terror and uncertainty.

“It's a curse!” “It's the mages!” “The Archmage . . .” “Where's it coming from?” “This way, you fools!”

Feeling as if she fled in a dream, Joanna gasped, “The others . . .”

“They'll have to do what they can!” They were in the open court, the darkness mingling into a raw and clammy fog that chilled her to the bone through her ripped dress. Parties of men were running everywhere, pikes and swords and crossbows in their hands; but with belated caution they were already running down toward the court.

The last scream died, and the darkness faded, just as they reached the gate.

Antryg dashed straight to the sentry in the gatehouse, pointed back across the court, and gasped, “In the guardroom . . .”

The man, involuntarily, turned his head to look, and the wizard's knobby fist, weighted with the pommel of his sword, smashed across his temple, even as the two guards who had been beside the gate came running toward him. Antryg caught the first man's descending halberd on the back of his blade, wrenching it up and stepping in under it to kick the man full, hard, and agonizingly in the groin; he was turning toward the second before the first man even hit the pavement. The courtyard behind them echoed with the clatter of boots-city guards, Church sasenna, and, Joanna saw, the Regent's men also, in their gold-braided black uniforms.

As if they'd rehearsed it, the instant the guard in the gatehouse had fallen, Joanna sprang to pull the pistol from his belt. It was doublebarreled. She knew, if she tried to hit Antryg's current opponent, she would just as likely hit Antryg, so she swung around and fired at the closest of the black-clothed sasenna rushing toward them out of the fog in the court. Nobody fell, but the lead men flinched and ducked; Antryg was beside her, his blade bloodied to the hilt, shouting, “RUN!”

She gathered up her skirts and ran. She was aware that he was not with her, but couldn't look back-only at the gray arch of fog ahead of her, beyond the stone, shadow, and portcullis ropes. It was as if she ran in a dream, adrenaline scorching her veins and her heart hammering at her that she had to escape-that after this, the consequences of capture would be unthinkable. .

She smelled the stagnant little moat that blocked the landward side of St. Cyr from the rest of the old island part of the town; her stockinged feet thumped hollowly on the silly little wooden drawbridge. Ahead of her, buildings bulked in the fog, old-fashioned architecture and slanted roofs mingling with the squarer lines of buildings a century or more old and already fallen into decay. Looking back, she caught the flash of Antryg's descending sword blade in the gatehouse and saw him pelting toward her through the shadows, a last frantic run as the portcullis, its counterweight ropes slashed, rumbled downward . . . .

Joanna felt as if her heart had stopped. Had it been a free drop, he could never have made it, but the geared wheels, even rolling loose, slowed the fall of those tons of iron just enough. He flung himself down and rolled, the weighted iron teeth of the grillwork gate grinding into their slots inches behind his body. Then he was on his feet and running toward her again, the ridiculous skirts of his too-big coat billowing behind him like a cloak. His face, she noticed in the fog, was as white as his shirt ruffle.

Men were crowding up against the portcullis, trying vainly to lift it without the counterweights. Pistols were thrust through the lowered grille; there was a deafening roar and a stench of black powder as Antryg reached her and caught her arm. Together they made a dash across the small, cobbled square. The rough paving-stones gouged her feet and the puddles soaked and chilled them through her thin stockings, but she scarcely noticed. Three men started to run down the steps of a tavern toward them, waving sticks. From the portcullis behind them, Joanna heard the whap of a crossbow firing and from the corner of her eye saw the bolt of it bury itself with hideous force in the tavern's wall. The three men flung themselves flat, and Antryg dragged her into the noisome mouth of the nearest alley.

Voices were echoing behind them in the square, dimmed and muffled by the fog, which was growing thicker, drifting clammily between the somber buildings and limiting their visibility to a few feet. Holding up her skirts with one hand and thanking all the Fates that watch over heroines that she'd had, by this time, plenty of practice fleeing in petticoats, Joanna stumbled along after Antryg as he walked rapidly down the slimy mud of the lane. The first jet of strength that had carried her over the drawbridge was fading. She felt weak and suddenly cold.

He ducked through a back gate into a narrow yard which, by the smell of it, was used promiscuously as a toilet facility by the entire overcrowded tenement it served, led her across it, through a dark doorway into what had once been the lower hall of some great house and was now the black and gloomy bottom floor of tenement lodgings, and out again through the front door onto the street. The fog seemed, if anything, thicker there. Holding her arm, he led her across a narrow, cobbled street, dodging aside as the shape of a horse-drawn vehicle of some kind loomed suddenly out of the gray mists, and then into another alley beyond. She heard voices shouting from somewhere and the clash of weapons, and all she could think was, We can't get caught. We can't get caught . . . .

“Here.” Antryg stopped. It seemed they were alone in a tiny bubble of solitude and the stink of rotting fish which permeated the mud underfoot. He seemed to see for the first time her torn bodice and disheveled hair, and a small, upright line that could have been pain or anger appeared between his brows. “Did they hurt you?”

Joanna shook her head. “Just threatened real good.”

A corner of his mouth quirked at that, but his eyes remained grave, as if he guessed that, had she been hurt, she would have been too ashamed to admit it. “You're sure?”

Why this concern for her true feelings should make her throat hurt with the urge to cry again, she didn't know-possibly because he was the first not to take her brusque, “I'm fine,” at face value, possibly simply because she was cold, frightened, and overwrought. She nodded, and he seemed to accept that. He pulled a tattered silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his swordblade with it, then sheathed it in the scabbard that was thrust, as Caris bore his when battle was at hand, through a sash at his waist. It made a sharp angle under the voluminous skirts of his coat. He took the pistol gently from her hand, checked it, and handed it back; then he stood for a moment looking down at her.

She thought he had been going to say something else, but he did not. It was coming to her that she was still alive and, at least for this second and possibly the next two, safe. It was against considerable odds that they both weren't lying dead in the shadows of the St. Cyr gatehouse. He put his hand up to touch her hair; then, as if half-doubtful of the wisdom of his action, bent and kissed her lips.

And he was right, she thought, to doubt. The kiss was probably intended to last much less time than it did. On the road their bantering had occasionally edged on flirtation, but he had been careful never to be alone with her, and for this she was, in a way, grateful. But now she was only aware of her own desperate need to hold him, all the terrors and dread of the last six hours swelling to bursting point within her, tightening her grip around his ribcage, the lock of the pistol she still held pressing awkwardly against his back, until she could feel every edge of shirt-ruffle and every button through her sweat-soaked shift and into her icy flesh. She was aware of his body against hers, holding her up as her knees shook, of the softness of the worn velvet under her hands, of the warmth of his breath on her cheek, and of her passionate desire to press her face to his shoulder and weep.

She tore her mouth free of his. She found she was breathing hard, trembling even as he was. She thought, This is crazy! But their eyes lingered, with a desperate knowledge that both of them were well aware verged on madness. Then he caught her hand and led her swiftly in the murk.

“Nothing quite so useful as a good fog,” he said after a few moments. “They said that the Archmage Elsheiyin used to summon fog by combing her hair, but most people need water of some kind. Suraklin could do it with water dipped up in his hand. Mind you, it isn't easy to summon one this early in the year.”

“Did Magister Magus do this?”

He shook his head. “No, this is mine. Tinkering with the weather is relatively safe because it's so difficult to detect. Magus is probably home under his bed by this time. No mage likes to get too close to St. Cyr, and he had to be almost up under the gatehouse to cast the darkness and the screams. To do him credit, he stayed much longer than I'd have thought.”

“What would you have done, if he hadn't agreed to help you?” Joanna asked, as they dodged across what appeared, in the clammy mists, to be a small courtyard, where the ghostly forms of men and women crowded in house doorways around mephitic braziers of coals amid a strong stench of smoke and gin.

“Given him a case of itches that would have worn out his fingernails for scratching,” Antryg replied promptly, and Joanna, in spite of herself, the danger, and the fact that a moment ago she'd been perilously close to exhausted tears, was shaken with the giggles.

“We've got to get off the island,” he added. “It's small enough that the Church's soldiers and the Regent's can quarter it between them. I was surprised to see the Regent's men; he must have returned to Angelshand. They'll know these alleys better than the Church sasenna will.” He stopped, turning his head to listen in the fog, his hand tightening on Joanna's arm. She sensed shapes moving against the darker bulk of an almost unseen building and felt a sudden qualm of terror of being caught in the open, fog-cloaked though it might be. It was late afternoon, and the vapors were suffused with a thin gray light; shapes within them shifted, dark and indistinct . . . .

Silently, Antryg melted back into a doorway to let them pass. Like the faint drip of water, their footsteps tapped away into the distance. Above the stench of greasy cooking and stale urine in the doorway around them, Joanna could smell the murky river somewhere close by. She shivered, the pistol feeling suddenly heavy in her grip. The wizard's hand was very warm where he patted her back through the thin, sweat-damp muslin of her gown. Like a pair of ghosts, they stepped from the doorway again and drifted through the vaporous dimness toward the chuckle of the water. It occurred to Joanna that, whatever the reason Antryg had kidnapped her-if he had kidnapped her-she seemed to have thrown in her lot entirely with him now. There was no longer whatever alternative course Caris could offer. If she—

In the darkness of an alley to their right, a sword clanked on stone. Antryg whirled, his hand going to his sword hilt. At the same instant, Joanna saw in the black, eyeless socket of a doorway to their right the shadows solidify into the shapes of men with swords. She hadn't even the span of an intaken breath to cry a warning. Antryg, alerted by some sixth sense that he'd walked into crossfire, was already turning back as the weighted pommel of a sword cracked down on the back of his head.

In a telescoping instant of time, Joanna was perfectly well aware that she was unable to carry him as he crumpled down against her; she was also aware that she had only one shot in her pistol and that, if she fired it now into the thick of the half-dozen sasenna closing in on them from the mouth of the alley opposite, she might buy herself the time to flee. Instead, she swung around on the man in the doorway as he pointed his crossbow down at the wizard's crumpled body on the wet cobblestones and cried, “Don't!”

Iron hands seized her from behind, dragging her back against an iron body as hard fingers wrenched the pistol from her grip. She knew it was useless to struggle, so she didn't. Looking up, she saw the red-haired sasennan who'd caught her at the posthouse on the Kymil road, the captain of the Regent's guards.